You could not acknowledge the identify Stephen Downing, however should you’re a fan of American cop reveals over the past 50 years or so, you might be little doubt conversant in his work.
Downing, a longtime Lengthy Seaside resident who died of sepsis in November at 87, drew on his years of expertise as a Los Angeles police officer, crafting tales for “Dragnet,” “Adam-12,” “Emergency” and “TJ Hooker,” amongst many others.
Many L.A. cops have some tangential relationship to the leisure business — they moonlight as safety guards on units or at crimson carpet occasions. Downing, who retired as a deputy chief in 1980, was one of many few to make it actually massive in each professions — like Joe Wambaugh, with whom he labored on the Nineteen Seventies TV drama “Police Story.”
Downing’s massive break reads like an awesome Hollywood twist. Sooner or later in 1968, the Hanford, Calif., native who had studied inventive writing in school occurred to choose up the cellphone on the 77th Division in South Los Angeles when Jack Webb, the “Dragnet” actor and producer, referred to as. Webb needed technical assist for a present he was growing, “Adam-12,” a couple of pair of patrol companions. Downing provided himself up, and shortly determined to strive his hand at scripts. “It’s tougher than it appears,” Webb instructed him.
“So my dad went house on a weekend, wrote the script, offered it and ended up writing greater than 400 hours of tv,” mentioned his son, Michael Downing, additionally a retired deputy police chief.
Retired LAPD deputy chief Stephen Downing at a lectern throughout a press convention in September 2010 for Proposition 19, a then California poll measure to regulate and tax marijuana.
(Damian Dovarganes / Related Press)
Earlier than Stephen Downing retired from the pressure in 1980, he used pseudonyms to keep away from angering his superiors, a few of whom resented his remunerative exterior work. “He used his police wage to pay his taxes,” joked his son.
At Downing’s leisure pinnacle, he spent seven years as showrunner for “MacGyver,” the enduring sequence starring Richard Dean Anderson because the genius fixer who extricates himself from thorny conditions utilizing duct tape and a Swiss military knife as a substitute of weapons and violence. MacGyver’s humane, anti-violence philosophy was an ideal reflection of Downing’s strategy to regulation enforcement.
“I feel he noticed an excessive amount of violence on this planet, too many weapons getting used and there have been alternate options to that,” his son instructed me. “I feel that’s the best way he needed the DNA of MacGyver to be. Downing had lengthy discussions with Henry Winkler and John Wealthy, the present’s govt producers, and he satisfied them it was the fitting factor to do.”
“I beloved him very a lot,” mentioned Winkler, who remained shut with Downing over time. Making Downing showrunner, Winkler instructed me, “was the neatest factor we did. He ran the present and he ran it impeccably…. and naturally, who higher than the assistant chief of police?”
MacGyver star Richard Dean Anderson, left, with sequence govt producer Henry Winkler and sequence showrunner Stephen Downing.
(Michael Downing)
After “MacGyver” resulted in 1992, Downing instructed The Instances that he acquired “tons of mail lamenting the lack of this function mannequin for youths: a hero who didn’t use a gun and demonstrated that should you use your thoughts you may get alongside fairly effectively on this world.” That response, he mentioned, was what made him proudest.
His sense of integrity and justice didn’t simply affect American leisure. That they had a profound impact on policing in our metropolis.
Shortly earlier than his retirement, Downing served on the use-of-force board that evaluated the horrific 1979 police killing of Eula Love, a 39-year-old African American mom and widow who had an altercation with utility employees after her fuel was turned off. A visibly distressed Love was holding a boning knife when two officers shot her eight instances at shut vary. Downing persuaded Police Chief Chief Daryl Gates, not precisely identified for his embrace of progressive policing, to create new coaching applications for the L.A. police academy.
“He satisfied Gates that we wanted to rewrite the use-of-force coverage,” Michael Downing mentioned. “We wanted a bunch extra coaching.”
Though I had corresponded by e mail with Downing for years, I didn’t meet him in individual till 2013, once I organized a panel dialogue at Cal State Northridge concerning the 1967 anti-Vietnam Warfare protest in Century Metropolis that devolved right into a police riot. Downing, then a younger officer working for Chief Tom Reddin, was appalled by his division’s response. (My father and I had been in a position to provide our views of the melee from the angle of a left-wing school professor and 11-year-old sixth-grader, respectively.)
Downing’s distaste for corruption led him to play an element within the downfall of former L.A. Police Chief Willie Williams, who had been employed after the 1992 riots to implement reforms really useful by the Christopher Fee and assist restore relations between police and the neighborhood. Although fashionable with residents, Williams had a delicate spot for freebies.
Downing, lengthy retired by then, reported to the Los Angeles Police Fee rampant rumors about Williams allegedly taking free lodge rooms in Las Vegas and soliciting free tickets from Common Studios. The fee rebuked Williams and declined to resume his contract, letting him go after his first time period. (However not earlier than his lawyer threatened to sue Downing for libel.)
In his later years, Downing, a bearish man who beloved a nightly Manhattan, turned an outspoken political commentator. A lifelong Republican till 2016, he had a Substack weblog and contributed for a decade to the Beachcomber, a Lengthy Seaside neighborhood newspaper. He even helped break a narrative concerning the Lengthy Seaside Police Division’s questionable use of a communications app that routinely deleted messages.
In case you are a daily reader of those pages, you could have undoubtedly seen one among his many letters to the editor or his occasional opinion essays concerning the ills of recent policing — together with the rampant militarization of native police forces, deputy gangs within the L.A. County Sheriff’s Division — or the battle on medicine, which he loathed.
“Prohibition will not be the reply and it’ll by no means be the reply as a result of it doesn’t and won’t work,” Downing instructed my colleague Steve Lopez in 2012.
Downing was a co-author of the poll argument in favor of 2016’s Proposition 64, which legalized hashish for leisure use in California. He was livid concerning the Trump administration’s airstrikes on alleged drug boats within the Caribbean, irate concerning the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids which were unleashed everywhere in the nation and was a harsh critic of immigration brokers in masks.
“When the general public can’t distinguish regulation enforcement from a road gang in tactical gear, we’re not speaking about policing — we’re speaking about energy untethered from accountability,” he wrote in a Instances opinion essay in October.
Over espresso in South Pasadena final week, I requested Michael Downing whether or not he considered himself because the son of a cop or the son of a TV author.
He thought for a second.
“I consider myself extra,” he mentioned, “because the son of an awesome human being.”
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